Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough dies at 89

David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose carefully crafted narratives on topics ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge to President John Adams and Harry Truman made him one of the most popular and influential historians of his time, has died. He was 89 years old.

McCullough died Sunday in Hingham, Massachusetts, according to his publisher, Simon & Schuster. He died less than two months after his beloved wife Rosalie.

“David McCullough was a national treasure. His books brought the story to life for millions of readers. Through his biographies, he dramatized the most compelling parts of the American character,” Jonathan Karp, CEO of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement.

A tireless and joyful student of the past, McCullough is dedicated to sharing his passion for history with the general public. He saw himself like everyone else blessed with a lifelong curiosity and the opportunity to pursue the subjects that mattered most to him. His passion for architecture and construction inspired his early work on the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge, and his admiration for leaders he considered good people drew him to Adams and Truman. In the 70s and 80s, he published his love for Paris in 2011. a great trip and the aviation bestseller Wright Brothers, released in 2015.

Outside of his books, the handsome, grizzled McCullough may have been the best known to historians, his paternal baritone familiar to PBS fans. american experience and the Ken Burns epic Civil war Documentary. hamilton Author Ron Chernow once called McCullough “both the name and the voice of American history.”

McCullough’s celebration of the American past also drew some of the harshest criticism of him, a love that easily turned into romance. Your 2019 book pioneers He was blamed for downplaying atrocities committed against Native Americans when 19th century settlers moved west. In his earlier work, he was accused of avoiding the hard truths about Truman, Adams and others, and of putting narrative above analysis.

“McCullough’s particular contribution was to treat large-scale historical biography as another genre of audience appreciation, an exercise in character recognition, a reliable source of edification and pleasurable upliftment,” wrote Sean Wilentz. new republic in 2001. In an interview with the Associated Press that same year, McCullough responded to criticism that he was too soft, saying that “some people not only want their leaders to have feet of clay, but they want them to be completely made of clay.” .

But even his colleagues, who criticized his work, praised his kindness and generosity and recognized his talent. And millions of readers and a smaller circle of award winners were touched by his stories. For years, from a wireless booth on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, McCullough worked on the Royal Standard typewriter that changed minds and shaped the market. It helped raise the profile of Truman and Adams and launched a wave of American Revolution bestsellers, including McCullough’s The Revolution. 1776.

McCullough received a National Book Award The way between the seas, on the construction of the Panama Canal; That’s why morning with horses, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt; And for the Pulitzer TrumanIn 1992 and so John Adams in 2002. big bridgeAn extensive study of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, it was ranked 48th on the Modern Library’s list of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century and is still widely regarded as the definitive text on the great project of the 19th century. On his 80th birthday, his hometown of Pittsburgh named the 16th Street Bridge the “David McCullough Bridge”.

McCullough was also a favorite in Washington, speaking at a joint session of Congress in 1989 and receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. Politicians often claimed to have read his books, especially the biographies of Truman and Adams. Jimmy Carter cited the “way between the seas” as a factor in establishing the 1977 treaties that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama, and politicians on both sides of the issue cited him during debates. Barack Obama included McCullough on a panel of academics that met at the White House shortly after his election.

The historian was nonpartisan throughout his life, but spoke out against Donald Trump in 2016, leading a group of historians that included Burns and Chernow in denouncing the Republican presidential candidate as a “disgusting clown with a disgusting ego.” McCullough also had a pressing cause: education. He worried that Americans knew too little about history and did not appreciate the sacrifices of the revolutionary era. He spoke frequently on campuses and in front of Congress, once telling a Senate committee that because of the No Child Left Behind Act, “history is being shut down or taken off the stove entirely in many or most schools.” in favor of mathematics and reading. . .”

McCullough was also active in preserving historic districts. He opposed the construction of a residential tower near the Brooklyn Bridge and was among historians and authors in the 1990s who criticized the Walt Disney Company’s planned Civil War theme park in a region of particular historical importance in Northern Virginia.

“We have very little that is authentic and real,” McCullough said at the time. “Replacing what we have with plastic history, fiction, mechanical history is almost sacrilege.”

McCullough took some jabs in his books, especially the New York politicians involved in the Brooklyn Bridge, but he preferred to write about people he liked, comparing them to his roommates. Disgust over Pablo Picasso’s personal life forced him to abandon a planned book about the artist, and his Adams biography was supposed to be about Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whose character also turned out to be highly flawed.

McCullough, whose father and grandfather founded the McCullough Electric Company, was born in Pittsburgh in 1933. She loved history as a child, remembering the animated conversations at dinner, the portraits of Washington and Lincoln that seemed to hang in every house and sidewalk nearby. . The place where Washington fought one of its first battles. He graduated from Yale University with a BA in English and met playwright Thornton Wilder, who encouraged the young student to write. McCullough worked for the United States News Agency, Sports Illustrated and American Heritage Publishing Company before deciding he wanted to try out a book about an event that occurred in his home state in 1889: the Johnstown flood, which killed more than 2,000 people and less The weather was as catastrophic as Hurricane Katrina more than a century later.

McCullough researched the book in his spare time and begged Little, Brown and Company in vain to publish it. He ended up with Simon & Schuster, which published the book in 1968, with a $5,000 advance, and remained its publisher throughout his career.

The Johnstown flood was so successful that McCullough feared that the author of the failure had been dubbed “McCullough Bad News”. Publishers asked him to write about the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. So for his next book, big bridgetold a success story. “The fact that I knew little or nothing about civil engineering, that I had never been good at mathematics or physics, or that I had no great interest in mechanical matters, did not discourage me in the least,” he later wrote. “I was very excited. I wanted to know so many things.”

McCullough followed The way between the seas s morning with horsesIt was published in 1981 and praised Gore Vidal as “part of a new and welcome genre: the biographical sketch”. Morning on Horseback won the National Book Award but, as Vidal pointed out, was overshadowed by Edmund Morris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. This would be the last time McCullough’s book received second billing.

He considered it a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, but instead contacted Roosevelt’s less dynamic and more direct successor, Harry Truman. McCullough spent the next decade writing the book, living for a time in Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri, and making it a daily routine, like the former president, to take morning walks.

TrumanA Million Seller was published in 1992, crowning and confirming the long rise of a man who had left office 40 years earlier with an approval rating of less than 30% and was now virtually canonized as an honest and persistent leader. Fans of the book included presidential candidate Ross Perot, who bluntly compared himself to Truman, and the first President Bush, who even consulted McCullough during his failed re-election bid.

John AdamsLaunched in 2001, it was so popular and useful to its community that Congress passed legislation the same year to erect a monument in honor of the second president. 1776 It was released in 2005, followed by an illustrated edition two years later. Based on the HBO miniseries John AdamsStarring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney, it aired in 2008. Tom Hanks was planning a miniseries based on McCullough’s book The Wright Brothers.

McCullough had five children, and his penchant for happily married politicians like Truman and Adams goes back to his wife, Rosalie Barnes, whom he married in 1954 and died in June. He was his editor, muse, and closest friend. At his home on Martha’s Vineyard, McCullough proudly showed visiting reporters a photo of their first date at a spring dance, the two of them looking at each other.